Send Back Sendak! Boost the Seuss!

I find Donald Phelps’ writing style maddening; circumlocution is piled on parapraxis until all you can really see is the giant, rather desperate sign waving back and forth: “Kiss me! I’m erudite!”

Nonetheless, his new column in TCJ is tackling interesting subjects. Last time out he talked about the classic pulp occult novels of Manley Wade Wellman, which look pretty fabulous. In TCJ 294, he compares Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss, which is a fun topic to think about, even if, (to no one’s astonishment) I disagree with everything he says.

Phelps’ basic point is that Sendak is better than Seuss because Sendak is more of a formalist. In the selection below, he’s talking particularly about a 1934 comic strip by Seuss which is fairly chaotic and ignores panel borders.

An object lesson, I might suggest, in the liabilities of kindergarten chaos as practiced ad infinitum by Giesel. It involves the jettison of form, embodied, in the example just cited, in those ubiquitous panel boundaries: expandable (as Hal Foster and Billy DeBeck variously demonstrated) but very, very seldom, if ever, dispensable or, challengeable, at least, as obtusely as Seuss challenged them. Form: that which delimits, that which demarks, that which identifies, in children’s art especially — like that of Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. Form entails a sense of the imagination’s geography and its component laws.

Such a geographic sense, along with the commitment it would appear to involve, has never been evident for me in the fantastical outpourings of Theodore Giesel. One recalls once more — somewhat querying — the little homilies embodied in some of the later books: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches the Egg. Aren’t such sermonettes the occasional warning or symptom that the author, albeit with whatever benign and public-spirited sentiments — recognizes (make that: re-recognizes) the work of his hands as a Marketable Commodity. And one might observe: a symptom of the deficiency of form, one might say, the integrity of the artist’s work, as manifested in laws, not homilies.

Phelps then goes on to laud Sendak for being more restrained and controlled:

The stories of Sendak unfold themselves in gravely exact segments of action, by soberly defined anatomies, enacting the fables in compact but soberly graphic pantomime. The pictures as a rule are not enclosed save by the pages’ white margins, the concentrated imagery suggesting a dream’s flickering vignettes. Yet, I can not sufficiently mark the tone of earthy, almost prosaic reality that Sendak bestows on his visions.

So to sum up, Seuss is uncontrolled, overly commercial, and kind of gauche. Sendak is controlled, brimming with artistic integrity, and classy.

The difference between Seuss and Sendak, in other words, isn’t only, or primarily, that Sendak is more interested in form. Phelps can natter on all he wants about the link between homilies and formlessness,capitalizing “Marketable Commodity” just to make it look more official, but that doesn’t change the fact that the central claim is complete bullshit. An interest in neat moral packages doesn’t have jack to do with how much of a formalist you are. Hogarth and Grunewald have pretty solid formal virtues I’d argue; so does Art Young. And for that matter, as far as language goes, Seuss, with his strict doggerel rhythms and rhymes, is much more interested in form than Sendak, who works in much looser verse or in prose, and who includes frequent asides and narrative wavering. Phelps is merely the victim of a common modernist critical confusion; the assumption that if an artist is willing to put meaning in his work, then that work must be formally bankrupt. This is a pernicious doctrine, and it should be hooted.

No, what Phelps is really getting at, undercover of his muddled cry of “form!”, is that Sendak is — definitively, self-consciously — high-brow. Sendak references Winsor McCay. He fetishizes volk culture (folk tales, nursery rhymes, his own ethnic roots.) He likes tweaking the bourgeoisie with a little bit of nudity here, some impish rebellion there. His books thrive on an improvisatory cleverness akin to that now thoroughly high-brow music, jazz (as in, say, “Hector Protector”, where the nursery rhyme “As I went over the water”, where the most memorable image is of a sea-monster mentioned nowhere in the text.)

Seuss, on the other hand, is a big, fat, middle-brow. He doesn’t tweak the bourgeoisie; he embraces them, with long screeds about how great democracy is and what a wonderful thing it is to celebrate Christmas. The volk he loves aren’t ethnic; they’re the deracinated Americana, with their lovely rituals of high-school graduation and self-help rhetoric. He doesn’t bother with old, fusty nursery rhymes…why should he, when he can make up twelve of his own just as easily?

In other words, I think that, in choosing Sendak over Seuss, Phelps is just proving that which should come as a shock to no one who has read his prose; namely, that he prefers the pose of an aesthete to the pose of an entertainer. That’s certainly not always the wrong choice, but I think it is in this instance. Sendak has done a lot of great books, and is a wonderful artist, but for me, at least, his pretentions can start to grate — he certainly *is* clever, but I wish occasionally he’d spend less time pointing it out, and more time telling a story that my son actually wanted to pay attention to. Seuss, on the other hand, may reek a bit of greasepaint and the uplift, but he sets off so many verbal and visual fireworks that I find it impossible to take offense.

13 Comments

“Phelps is merely the victim of a common modernist critical confusion; the assumption that if an artist is willing to put meaning in his work, then that work must be formally bankrupt. “

What are you citing here to back up that reading? I don’t recall anything about “meaning” as any sort of measure in the Phelps piece. Maybe I misread it, I honestly don’t know. I didn’t get the sense that Phelps was making an argument so much as seeking to delineate for himself, and the concomitant readership, the nature of his appreciation for Sendak and Suess. I also don’t think Phelps was “arguing” that sendak was more a formalist than Suess , more that he used the form in service of “quaintness” to more satisfactory ends than Suess. I don’t know man. I’ll reread the piece.As far as being “erudite”, I think he actually is.

In the paragraphs I quote, Phelps argues (suggests? intimates? gestures in the general direction?) that Seuss’ use of morals is linked to his formal insufficiencies. That’s what I’m citing, for what it’s worth.

As for erudite; I mean, sure, he probably went to grad school; he’s read a lot of stuff. I don’ t think he’s dumb. But the prose style…urk.

tom, maybe i'm literal minded, but i was reading that as anatomy, as in sendak's children are shaped like children, & never have one leg longer than the other just because it looks funner that way. which, in my opinion, would not work at all in the way sendak draws & works very well in the way that seuss drew.

it sounds, from the excerpt, like seuss's weird, non-internally-logical exuberance just weirds phelps out, which is funny. i shouldn't assume, not knowing the guy or even having read the full piece, but i wouldn't be surprised if children weird him out & kind of frighten him as well.

like the way he uses "sober" twice in one paragraph, as praise for sendak's style. sobriety isn't what i think of when i think of the most beloved children's books. maybe in a horror story, or something, but horror picture books will often have a goofy punchline, even so.

noah, it is hard to overstate my sedak-love, but i think you have hit on something, in the highbrow-vs-middlebrow argument. maybe that's why i enjoy sendak's earlier stuff more, in the wild things/night kitchen/really rosie era, before he got wind of the fact that he was a living legend. i also remember reading that past a certain age, there just weren't any more children in his life, which may explain something also.

Thanks, Miriam. I’d go for your reading of the phrase, especially since I can’t think of a different one, but the quote’s use of “the stories enact themselves” throws me.

Because of that phrase, I would think the fellow was talking about storytelling, the way that information is parceled out among words and pictures to get across the narrative. The way the figures were drawn wouldn’t be super-relevant here, just the fact that they were there and ready to be deployed.

And Sendak’s approach to anatomy doesn’t seem all that sober. Those are cartoon kids. Maybe their legs don’t change length unexpectedly, but that’s about it.

On the other hand, I can’t imagine what else Phelps might mean by “anatomies” or why he would use that word if he had some nonstandard meaning in mind.

Maybe someone who’s gone thru the whole essay can help us out. Or maybe I can read it myself. I was hoping for a short cut.

I think he’s drawing a parallel between drawing style and story function. Maybe not though. It doesn’t make sense as a commentary on drawing style alone though. I think Sendaks’ cartooning is pretty sober. I don’t think the effect is “sobering”. When you compare it to classic cartooning technique, it has none of the bounce or extreme exaggeration; the line-work is usually in a uniform, soft pencil with pretty basic shading technique. I think it goes back to his opening bit about what we consider “quaint”; that Sendaks’ use of form includes qualities that lend themselves to it- He uses the word “sober”, but in this case I think it means clarity and calm rather than stark or jarring.

So yeah, I think he’s saying that Sendak’s bodies are less goofy. The “soberly” repetition is probably just an accident; I know I was making fun of his style, but honestly, that sort of thing happens when nobody’s proofreading, which is more or less the case at the Journal.

Miriam, Phelps does say he likes Seuss. I like Sendak too. Highbrow isn’t always bad; I like Nabokov. I think Sendak did stiffen up a bit; his earliest are his best….whereas I think Seuss held out longer (the second book of tongue twisters I mentioned is from the late 70s.)

I didn’t like Phelps’ prose style when I started. But his piece on Ditko’s Mr. A won me over — and now I really enjoy it(I hope to be a quarter as good a critic as he is ever, much less when I’m in my 80s!). What’s interesting is that his writing style is exactly the way he speaks, minus a Brooklyn accent.

I can see why you, Noah, in particular, may not like Phelps’ style. You two have polar opposite sensibilities. You wield your language and your criticism like a blunt instrument — your method to provoke thought is to, well, provoke. I think Phelps’s language use is lyrical: and his method more meditative and gentle. It’s almost like Phelps anticipates you when he ponders contemporary response to the term “quaintness”: “Disdain for, an impatience with, a strangeness that is noncompetitive and nonaggressive.”

I agree with Uland as to what Phelps’ main point is: reread that last paragraph in Phelps’ column. I believe you’ve misinterpreted and misrepresented Phelps, and so it’s more useful to me to reframe your argument in two ways: 1. your reading of what you think Phelps said is telling about your critical position in general and 2. as to why you like Suess better than Sendak.

By the way, he’s not talking about a 1934 comic strip that doesn’t have panel borders, he’s saying that as far as he knows, the only time Seuss worked with borders was in that strip, and that the comic strip wasn’t that appealing to children.

You haven’t read Phelps, Tom? I think the paragraph right before the one Noah selected gives that statement more context; he’s comparing the nature of the monstrous in Seuss and Sendak, and how the children in each conquer them.